Announce: Rakudo Star Perl 6 Compiler Distribution Release 2016.07

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to announce the July 2016 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2016 release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This is the third post-Christmas (production) release of Rakudo Star and implements Perl v6.c. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms).

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional with the JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM backend only.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2016.07 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2016.07 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Some of the new compiler features since the last Rakudo Star release include:

Ability to use a custom debugger module

The "is-approx" sub from Test.pm6 now allows for relative/absolute tolerance

perl6-lwp-simple: track github.com/perl6/perl6-lwp-simple as upstream (as panda does) which has a test fix needed since we don't support https in R* and a test url had a new https redirect

perl6intro.pdf has also been updated.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

non-blocking I/O (in progress)

some bits of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, presentations, reference materials, design documents, and other supporting resources. Some Perl 6 tutorials are available under the "docs" directory in the release tarball.